>
>
> how to write in amharic with Abiword? I am using Mandrake 9.2 and Abiword
> 2.0

Before going into details, let's make clear, that it's not really an
Abiword problem. It is still quite closely related to it though, so
I hope nobody will regard the following useless.

Are you sure Amharic is supported by Unicode? If it is, and you have
a properly coded Unicode font installed for it, you can just use
gucharmap (embedded in Abiword or independently started) to
cut-and-paste its characters into your document.

If you want to write longer passages in this language, you can try
defining your own Amharic xkb keyboard using the Unicode code points of
the required characters, even if there's no "shorthand" codename for
them (like e.g. "uacute" etc.). I think you need to put a capital U
before the code point with no space between the two in order to make it
work in the definition file, like this:

U03A8 (this should be a Greek capital psi),

but I'm not quite sure if it's the correct syntax.

If you have the keyboard, you need to copy it to the directory called
xkb/symbols (I think the exact path is /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols
under Mandrake) and you need to make it selectable during your X
session (put in a line for it into xkb/rules/xfree86.lst, and it
should become visible to KDE's keyboard layout manager). Studying the
files already in the directory should help you with the syntax of the
files.

If Amharic is not supported by Unicode, but you have a font that
contains the characters required for it, then you need to find out
which characters' positions are "reused" for this purpose and simply
type those while using the font. This of course makes your document
dependent on the particular font used, so it should be avoided if at all
possible.